How Republicans Lose by Winning in 2014

With the Democrats currently holding the U.S. Senate it is easy for Republicans to be the party "No" since they merely blame Democrats for blocking their agenda.  The reality, of course, is that the Congressional GOP doesn't have a real agenda nor does it have to worry about governing.  But, if the GOP ends up holding both houses of Congress after the 2014 midterm elections, that will change.  The GOP will have to govern and come up with real solutions to problems.  Moreover, the GOP base may pressure the party to press policies that will come back to haunt it in 2016 when gerrymandered districts will do nothing to help at the presidential race level.  An article in Politico looks at this reality.  Here are excerpts:

It’s the predominant paradox of contemporary American politics: If Republicans prevail in this year’s midterm congressional elections, it will be because of their party’s sharp-edged stances on topics like abortion and Benghazi, Obamacare and immigration, gay marriage and the minimum wage — issues that energize the GOP’s core base of support.

But if Republicans lose the race for the White House in 2016, it will be because of their party’s polarizing, out-of-step stances on those very same issues, which alienate much of the broader electorate the GOP needs to win a national contest in a country whose demographics and political realities are shifting under its feet.

Establishment Republicans had a good night in Tuesday’s round of primaries, but they did so in part by adopting positions at odds with the long-term need to broaden the party’s support and move away from litmus-test issues. A wide range of Republicans see the party courting the same disaster it did in 2012, playing a base game that will keep it shut out of the White House.

“The Republican Party has essentially now two wings: a congressional wing and the national wing,” the veteran GOP pollster Bill McInturff said at a recent Pew Research Center forum on so-called millennial voters, those from 18 to 29 years of age. The congressional wing is thriving, especially in the South, in districts that are 75 percent, or even 80 percent, white, and where every incumbent’s worst fear is a challenge from the right.

But McInturff summed up the national party’s prospects with an old line from Mr. T in “Rocky III”: “Prediction? Pain!” He said the party’s “genetic instinct” is that younger voters don’t vote, and too many Republicans don’t understand the coming demographic wave. 

[T]he ideological divide within the Republican Party, and between its most conservative wing and the wider electorate, is sharper and starker than ever.

Republican House members seeking reelection may well benefit from their lockstep opposition to raising the minimum wage this year. But three past and future presidential contenders — Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty and Rick Santorum — recently called that a losing proposition in the longer term. 

Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), under challenge from the tea party wing in safely Republican states, may help themselves this year with their support for a bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks. But the hangover from their party’s identification with such a position may well produce a backlash in battleground presidential states two years from now.

“The Republicans in Washington are just treading water,” Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “They think, we’re getting a wave, we just have to sort of bob along, the wave is going to carry us along. I get nervous when I see that.” Kristol went on to criticize “the failure of the Republican leadership, especially in the House, to have an agenda, to push the issues, to go populist.”

[T]here is a case to be made that even if Republicans consolidated their power on the east end of Constitution Avenue, the party’s hard-core and nihilist caucuses would prevent them from adopting an affirmative agenda that could appeal to voters in 2016.

“When the House Republicans came to power in 2010, they ran on the economy and all these other things, and the first thing they did was abortion bills,” said Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank. “I’m very supportive of us winning the Senate, but there’s an argument that losing the Senate is not the worst catastrophe in the world. The structural problem they have right now is they’re a congressional party, so they can’t make national party decisions.”

The GOP’s prospective 2016 field will face the same problem.